According to figures released by the Central Statistics Office house prices across Ireland rose by an average of 8.1% in the year to February. The latest statistics show that on average house prices have been rising steadily for nine consecutive months and that the average national price rise is the strongest that it has been since before the crash in June 2007. These figures give strength to the belief that the recovery of the Irish housing market is well under-way.

Outside of Dublin house prices across the country rose by 0.9% during the month of February and were up by 4.2% compared with the same month last year. However, the value of property in the capital fell by 0.6% compared to the previous month of January. However, house prices in Dublin still managed to be 13.3% higher than they were in February 2013, making the overall picture a positive one despite this small setback. Equally the progressively rising prices across the rest of the country offer more than a little compensation for an under-performing Dublin.

The feature had up until recently been held solely for some of the larger industry giants and political figures, the advice and blog section of LinkedIn has now been made available for all users to share their advice, opinions and ideas. The news of this was announced in a blog post and was suggested that is to rival Twitter; giving users the potential to publicize their brand through yet another medium, without the 140 character limit.

To give an example of how “exclusive” the influencers blog, released during October 2012 examples of some of the 150 people who used it involve Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Martha Stewart. As of now, 25.000 people will be catered for with this service – a number which will grow over the years.

As of the update, LinkedIn users can follow members outside of their existing network and use the new medium to build a new group of followers. The new medium enables them to also share photos, videos and presentations via SlideShare.

The service was initially launched in October 2012 covering a total of 150 people, but now the service will cater to an initial 25,000 people and will be expanded upon over the coming months and years.

“The valuable Influencer posts and the wide range of professional content from millions of publishers that we currently aggregate on LinkedIn are powerful, but only the tip of the iceberg. Combined, our members have extremely valuable and varied experiences; however, their knowledge and expertise has not yet been captured and shared.” – Ryan Roslansky, head of content development at LinkedIn

A large reasoning for making the influencer’s blog public was to attract a new, teenage, audience.

A second feature recently released by the business social network is the ability to block members from seeing your profile, posts and prevent them from messaging you. However, it is important to take into account other ways of hindering unwanted contact such as changing your security settings and disconnecting from people.

In a report launched in Brussels by EU commission vice president Neele Kroes, the App Market in Europe has the ability to generate around 4.8 million jobs within the next 5 years. In 2013, we saw the app market generate 17.5 billion euro and this is expected to rise to 63 billion by 2018. With the app market rising, coding seems to be becoming a very important life skill.

Attending the launch of this report was peter Vesterbacka, CMO of Rovio, the developer of Angry Birds. Vesterbacka spoke on the challenges of developing a healthy “app economy” in Europe and declared Angry Birds to be the “biggest digital brand ever”. He also mentioned a scheme to teach children how to code with the “Angry Birds Playground” educational programme.

The EurApp report is based on a study conducted over the course of a year by the Inishgt Centre for Data Analytics and NUI Galway .The study was in association with Gigaom Research and was conducted by John Breslin.

Only 6 billion euro of the above revenue was actually generated from app sales, spending within the apps and advertisement. The bulk of the revenue, came from contract labour.

To give an insight of the earning power of apps, Flappy Bird, a game which was released to app stores briefly this month, generated 50,000 euro in revenue per day for advertisement.

“We all know there’s been a huge growth in apps but the actual revenue numbers in terms of jobs, app sales and contract development work are very encouraging,” – Vesterbacka

What is your opinion on the future of the app market? Let us know @4pm!

Despite YouTube visitors watching over six billion hours of videos each and every month split between over 800 million users, not all eyes are “real”. Many users purchase fake views which YouTube have said they intend to periodically check up on, validating views on videos to remove the frauds as not to deceive users.

“When some bad actors try to game the system by artificially inflating view counts, they’re not just misleading fans about the popularity of a video, they’re undermining one of YouTube’s most important and unique qualities,” Commented YouTube software engineer Philipp Pfeiffenberger. “While in the past we would scan views for spam immediately after they occurred, starting today we will periodically validate the video’s view count.”

“If you’re considering paying someone to increase your view count, you may want to think again. You probably won’t get what you paid for,” stated the blog post

“Views generated by some third-party businesses and services will not be counted on YouTube, and can lead to disciplinary action against your account, including removing your video or suspending your account.” In short, it is described as cheating and unnessacary.

Although initially established as a video sharing website, YouTube is now considered a search engine, and is currently the second most frequently visited search engine in the world, shadowing behind Google.

Wolfgang Digital, a company of self-proclaimed Digital Marketing “Nerds”, recently carried out a study which examined the click through rate (or CTR) of the variety ad-types on Facebook, The study has proven that the number of clicks on ads that appear on a user’s newsfeed is significantly higher than ads elsewhere and thus receive a higher level of engagement

Over a seven month campaign, beginning in June 2013 and ending in January 2014, the Wolfgang Digital team analysed three million Facebook Impressions through 24/7 campaign. In doing so, Wolfgang Digital successfully determined that the average CTR for a facebook display ad (those which appear on the right hand side of the screen, beside the friends list), was 0.4pc,which is around half the average CTR for display ads across the net.

Ads in users news feeds however, were shown to hold a CTR of 2.09 PTC making them 51 times more likely to be clicked on than facebook display ads. The tremendous CTR of News Feed Ads is close to the CTR seen in ads by Google AdWords

There are roughly 2.4 million people across Ireland alone, who use Facebook. However, despite the massive user base, ads on Facebook often don’t receive the desired attention. Wolfgang’s figures are similar to those concluded by a study from AdRoll, stating news feed ads were 49 times more likely to generate clicks than display ads.